Thursday, December 21, 2017

OPINION | JEFFREY D. SACHS- Stopping Armageddon

OPINION | JEFFREY D. SACHS-

Stopping Armageddon

LESLEY BECKER/GLOBE STAFF/ASSOCIATED PRESS
By Jeffrey D. Sachs   
American arrogance and President Donald Trump’s delusional worldview have brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Before it is too late, American citizens must make overwhelmingly clear that we do not want millions of Americans or others to perish in a reckless attempt by the Trump administration to overthrow the North Korean regime or denuclearize it by force.
We would rather accept a nuclear-armed North Korea that is deterred by America’s overwhelming threat of force than risk a US-led war of choice, one that would almost surely involve nuclear weapons. Yet National Security Advisor H. R. McMaster has explicitly said that Trump rejects “accept and deter.” The danger from Trump could not be greater.

“Accept and deter” is not appeasement. It is the moral and practical requirement of survival. Appeasement would be the case if North Korea were demanding the surrender of the United States or South Korea, but that’s not the case. North Korea argues that it needs nuclear arms to protect the regime from the threat of a US attack. According to North Korea, it seeks a “military equilibrium,” not a surrender of the United States or South Korea.
ADVERTISEMENT
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has just called for direct talks with North Korea without precondition. This is a glimmer of hope. Given Tillerson’s fragile hold on office and Trump’s continued reckless rhetoric vis-a-vis North Korea, we need to rally in favor of diplomacy.
Sad to say, North Korea’s fears of a US-led overthrow are realistic at this moment in history. Creating the conditions for North Korea’s eventual denuclearization would require trust-building over many years of patient diplomacy and interaction, including US diplomatic recognition of North Korea.
The United States faces a trap of its own making. For decades, this country has forcibly overthrown regimes it deemed to be hostile to US interests. North Korea fears that it is next.
Since the early 1990s, North Korea has repeatedly demanded security guarantees from the United States – including diplomatic recognition, economic measures, and other steps – in exchange for ending its drive toward a nuclear arsenal. Several agreements were in fact reached on the idea of guaranteeing North Korean security in return for denuclearization, yet all of the agreements subsequently collapsed. A very insightful and balanced account of these failed attempts is provided in a Brookings Institution report by a senior Chinese foreign policy expert, Fu Ying, chairwoman of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National People’s Congress of China.Recently, three regimes that ended their nuclear programs were subsequently attacked by nuclear powers. Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapons program came to an end after the first Gulf War, in 1990; Saddam was overthrown by the US in 2003. Moammar Khadafy ended his nuclear program in December 2003 and was overthrown by US-backed forces in 2011. Ukraine surrendered its nuclear forces in 1994 in return for security guarantees, but was subsequently attacked by Russia in 2014.
Mutual distrust is the basic reason for repeated failures. The US again and again dragged its feet on granting diplomatic recognition and economic assistance to North Korea, despite explicit promises to do so. North Korea, for its part, violated the spirit if not the letter of the agreements, using covert means at times to skirt agreed nuclear safeguards. Both sides have been trapped in the “security dilemma,” meaning that each believes the worst about the other and acts accordingly. The result is a terrifying arms race and downward spiral toward nuclear war.
ADVERTISEMENT
In this tit-for-tat pattern, it is difficult if not impossible to identify who has broken the various accords first. The bottom line is that there is no security agreement for North Korea, and no long-term suspension or abandonment by North Korea of its nuclear program. Now Trump’s tempermental instability could trigger a nuclear war through the belief adopted by either side that the other is about to launch a devastating preemptive attack.
The Trump administration is threatening North Korea with war if it fails to denuclearize. There are probably senior US military advisors who believe in the possibility of a quick “decapitation” of the North Korean regime before its nuclear weapons are unleashed. Some advisors may believe that America’s antimissile systems would protect the US and its allies in the event that North Korea launches its nuclear weapons.
In my view, any confidence in a military solution is reckless and immoral. Most expert assessments suggest massive deaths in South Korea, perhaps 20,000 per day, from a conventional war, much less a nuclear war. Most experts believe that the antimissile systems are highly imperfect, with a real possibility of failure.
If there is one lesson of history, it is to doubt the boastful pronouncements of warmongers. Things go wrong. One’s own weapons systems frequently fail. Treachery, surprise, accidents, errors are the essence of war. And with nuclear war, one doesn’t get a second chance. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, JFK’s reckless generals urged a military attack, believing that a nuclear war could be avoided. The truth was that the Russian and Cuban troops were already deployed to use battlefield nuclear weapons in the event of a conventional US attack.
Perhaps the most important lesson that came out of the Cuban Missile Crisis is the conclusion of President Kennedy in his famous “Peace Speech” of June 1963, which ushered in the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty:
“Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war. To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy — or of a collective death-wish for the world.”
Amen.
Jeffrey D. Sachs is university professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, and author of “The Age of Sustainable Development.”

--
"Not one step back"

Cole Harrison
Executive Director
Massachusetts Peace Action - the Commonwealth's largest grassroots peace organization
11 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138
Twitter: masspeaceaction




--
"Not one step back"

Cole Harrison
Executive Director
Massachusetts Peace Action - the Commonwealth's largest grassroots peace organization
11 Garden St., Cambridge, MA 02138
Twitter: masspeaceaction

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Massachusetts for Peace in Korea" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to mass-peace-korea+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to mass-peace-korea@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mass-peace-korea/CAKfC%2B3uWThpYHfyWnL%3DKqfhU%3DMO99tX3S5vVa%2BDxiv7K71zuGA%40mail.gmail.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Smedley VFP Forum" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to smedleyvfpforum+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to smedleyvfpforum@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/smedleyvfpforum/CACZOYmfAYAq3Dhb71TFq6dn84Ubx_KSexgBnttzaxn3UZP_tww%40mail.gmail.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Posted by at No comments:

From Autopsy to Revival? Wake the Democratic Party.

RootsAction Team via info=rootsaction.org
To    
We have a crucial fight on our hands!


 Share this action on Facebook
 Share this action on Twitter
The chair of the Democratic Party’s Unity Reform Commission rejected a request for just five minutes to present the conclusions of the new report “Autopsy: The Democratic Party in Crisis.” But the task force that wrote the Autopsy got the message across anyway.

With the support of RootsAction, three members of the Autopsy task force traveled across the country to the recent final meeting of the commission. Uninvited, they spoke up -- and were heard not only by commission members but also by a nationwide audience via C-SPAN.

Our bright-colored signs and prominent six-foot banner also reached viewers with a crucial question: “Democratic Party or Undemocratic Party?”

The commission took a few steps toward democratizing the party. But the recommendations will soon go to the Rules and Bylaws Committee -- which DNC Chair Tom Perez has purged so badly that it now includes virtually no Bernie Sanders supporters.

We have a crucial fight on our hands! 

As the sponsor of the Autopsy report that continues to reverberate in grassroots discourse about the Democratic Party’s future, RootsAction is gearing up for a new phase in the quest to democratize the party.

You can help move this vital campaign forward in two ways right now:

*  Click here to go to the section of the Autopsy titled “Democracy and the Party” -- and use the icons on that webpage to share it far and wide via social media as well as via email.

*  Help RootsAction and the Democratic Autopsy Task Force to keep on pushing. Support this vital effort by clicking here. RootsAction will pour the donations into our ongoing nationwide campaign to insist that the Democratic Party live up to its first name.

Yes, we want a strong united front to remove Republicans from power. At the same time, facile Democratic Party unity behind a failed approach -- internally undemocratic and politically hitched to corporate wagons -- would hardly be auspicious.

“Emerging sectors of the electorate are compelling the Democratic Party to come to terms with adamant grassroots rejection of economic injustice, institutionalized racism, gender inequality, environmental destruction and corporate domination,” the Autopsy points out. And it adds: “Siding with the people who constitute the base isn’t truly possible when party leaders seem to be afraid of them.”

Although the Democratic National Committee proclaimed anew at the start of this month that the Unity Reform Commission meeting would be “open to the public,” the DNC delayed and obscured information about the meeting. And it never replied to the people who filled out an online RSVP form -- thus leaving them in the dark about the times and exact location of the meeting. In short, the DNC went out of its way to suppress public turnout.

One member of the Autopsy task force, Karen Bernal, is the chair of the Progressive Caucus of the California Democratic Party. She took the liberty of speaking up as the second day of the commission meeting got underway. Karen provided a firm rebuke of the DNC’s efforts to suppress public attendance.

“For all of the talk about wanting to improve and reform and make this party more transparent, the exact opposite has happened,” Karen told the commission. (Her intervention aired in full on C-SPAN.)

Please share information about the Autopsy via email and social media. Also, the Democratic Autopsy Task Force can only sustain and widen our efforts if people like you contribute what you can afford. Whatever you do will be much appreciated!

Overall, the commission approved some recommendations that were improvements. One of the most notable: It called for reducing the number of notoriously undemocratic superdelegates to the national convention from 712 to about 300, while the only democratic number would be zero.

In a section written by civil rights attorney Pia Gallegos, the Autopsy declared: “The superdelegate system, by its very nature, undermines the vital precept of one person, one vote. The voting power of all superdelegates must end."

Here at RootsAction, we’re organizing to insist that the party live up to its first name. That’s why we’re putting a huge amount of energy and lots of our scant resources into supporting the Autopsy work.

In his cover story for The Nation about the Autopsy report, William Greider calls it “a text for rebellion and a rough suggestion of what a born-again Democratic Party might look like.” We think that organizing resistance with vision is necessary if the Democratic Party is to fulfill the twin imperatives spelled out in the Autopsy: “The goal is clarity for the challenges ahead to end Republican rule and gain lasting momentum for progressive change.”

Thank you!



-- The RootsAction.org Team

P.S. RootsAction is an independent online force endorsed by Jim Hightower, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cornel West, Daniel Ellsberg, Glenn Greenwald, Naomi Klein, Bill Fletcher Jr., Laura Flanders, former U.S. Senator James Abourezk, Frances Fox Piven, Lila Garrett, Phil Donahue, Sonali Kolhatkar, and many others.

Background
>>  Sophia McClennen, Salon: “The DNC’s Day of Reckoning Is Here”
>>  Norman Solomon, Common Dreams: “Battle for Democratic Party: After the Unity Reform Commission”
>>  The Real News: “Nina Turner on Transforming the Democratic Party From the Inside”
>>  Katrina vanden Heuvel, Washington Post syndicated column: “Democrats Have a Chance to Revive the Party. Will They Seize It?”
>>  Daniel Marans, HuffPost: “DNC Unity Commission Agrees on Slate of Historic Reforms”
>>  The Real News: Video interview with Norman Solomon
>>  Richard Eskow, Our Future: “Democrats Need More Democracy, Not Less”
>>  William Greider, The Nation: "What Killed the Democratic Party?"
>>  “AUTOPSY: The Democratic Party in Crisis”
Donate buttonFacebook buttonTwitter button

empowered by Salsa
Posted by at No comments:

In Boston- Understanding Islam: A Muslim Woman's Perspective on the Essence of Islam

Inline image 1


121 Mount Vernon Street
Boston, MA 02108
617 523 0970
Understanding Islam: A Muslim Woman's Perspective on the Essence of Islam
Hayat Imam
Tuesdays, March 20 - April 24 1:00 - 3:00 p.m. 6 sessions
The Engineering Center, One Walnut Street
By some accounts, over 60 percent of US citizens say they have never met a Muslim or know much about the religion of Islam. Under such circumstances, misunderstandings and stereotypes find room to grow and develop. Yet, in this increasingly connected globe, it’s clear that our hope for survival lies in fostering understanding and empathy. 
In this course, an American Muslim, who has lived and worked in many Muslim countries, will share facts and figures about Islam along with her experience as a practicing Muslim, immigrant, and peace activist. The goal of this course is to shed light and build bridges through exposure to knowledge about Islam and Muslims, and to address some of the misconceptions that get in the way of making deeper connections. This course will offer information that may feel challenging, and share glimpses of what Muslims experience, feel, and believe. But, in this process, we may end up being surprised, and delighted, to find that people we thought of as very different are more akin to us than we realized!  
The course will cover the following topics: 
I. Islamic Culture and the Diversity of the Muslim World
II.  What’s at the Heart of Islam
III.  The Early History of Islam and Its Contributions to Civilization 
IV.  The Relationship between the West and Islamic Societies and a Look at Muslims in the U.S.A.
V.  The Impact of U.S. Militarism on Muslim Countries
VI.  Visualizing a Way Forward for a United States That Is Peaceful, Accepting, and Supportive of All Its Citizens.
Each session will include a presentation, interspersed with time for questions  and answers. A few guest lecturers will be invited to enhance certain topics.
Teaching Style: Lecture with discussion     Weekly Preparation: None-1 hour

Hayat Imam
Hayat Imam is an American-Muslim of Bangladeshi origin. She is a feminist-activist committed to building global social justice movements. Former Executive Director of the Boston Women’s Fund and Board Chair of Grassroots International, she is an active member of Mass Peace Action and Dorchester People for Peace. Hayat was a keynote speaker at the Boston Women’s March in January 2017.

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "SmedleyVFP" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to Smedleyvfp+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Posted by at No comments:

Of Real Golfers and Fakahs- A Cautionary Tale

Of Real Golfers and Fakahs- A Cautionary Tale



By Si Lannon

[As of December 1, 2017 under the new regime of Greg Green, formerly of the on-line American Film Gazette website, brought in to shake things up a bit after a vote of no confidence in the now deposed and self-exiled previous site administrator Allan Jackson (who used the moniker Peter Paul  Markin on this site) was taken among all the writers at the request of some of the younger writers abetted by one key older writer, Sam Lowell, the habit of assigning writers solely to specific topics like film, books, political commentary, and culture is over. Also over is the designation of writers in this space, young or old, by job title like senior or associate. After a short-lived experiment by Green designating everybody as “writer” seemingly in emulation of the French Revolution’s “citizen” or the Bolshevik Revolution’s “comrade” all posts will be “signed” with given names only. The Editorial Board]

[As the above notice has indicated the former site administrator, Allan Jackson, an old friend of mine from high school days and a man whom I supported during the recent intense bitter internal struggle at this site which centered on future direction and purpose, has been deposed and banished to exile (self-banished according to him but seen differently by the survivors). Because the fight was along generational lines, self-styled “Young Turks” and branded “old-timers” as much as anything else new administrator Greg Green, with the endorsement of the newly-revived Editorial Board, has decided to let each combatant give their take on the issues at dispute, if they so desire. The reasoning as far as a I know is to clear the air and to let the reading public know what goes on behind the scenes of every publishing operation, old-fashioned hard copy and new-fangled social media driven before any material sees the light of day.

I have no serious gripe about Allan’s tenure except that I did notice he got more set in his ways as he got older. Was less inclined to “go off the reservation” with any new idea presented to him to expand the subject matter which forms the living experience of the American scene.  What I am about to speak of though, hopefully without setting off an avalanche of gripes about the old regime, is related to the subject of today’s post, sports, specifically golf, my favorite sport. Sports, including golf, something which Allan was adamantly against posting material on reasoning that there were an infinite number of sports outlets putting an infinite amount of information about every possible sport or game and we did not need to, could not, compete against that reality. Furthermore although this site is about important nodal social, political and cultural happenings in America which includes an overweening love of sport by significant segments of the population he would pass on assigning or accepting any sport-related posting.

As a general proposition for the direction of this site I would, and did, agree with him on that. Except my sports perspective was not the television, radio, on-line professional and top amateur stuff but down in the average American trenches. How an average Joe goes about the business of doing some sport, again specifically golf, which I enjoy and having been a member of a golf club long enough have plenty of “slice of life” material. No go, no go until recently that is which I will mention in a minute.             

What busted me up, almost at one point busted up our friendship which has been pretty solid since high school many, many years ago was that several years ago, Allan was all over the idea of having a significant sports angle posted on this site. And not some “literary” (his term stolen from the real Peter Paul Markin, a big friend in our youth) touch like Ring Lardner did with his baseball series around the title You Know Me, Al  in the early 20th century or Damon Runyon with betting horses (or betting on anything) in a million shrewd short stories centered on old Broadway a little later.

Allan’s idea, reflecting his personal interest in college football, was to write, or have somebody write weekly commentaries during the college football season every fall. And for a couple of years, this before I started writing regularly for this site, I guess he thought he had cornered the wisdom on the “sports” market. Thought that doing so would make American Left History more relevant to some anonymous “average Joe” who would then pick up on the various historical and political points which are the hallmark of the site. The hook? Project the winners of each week’s games. Not just the winner’s but as always in sports, certainly in football, provide a numbered point spread for the readers to use when making their bets elsewhere.

There were two problems with that approach. First Allan, unlike the real Markin always known as Scribe, didn’t know the first thing about football, at least what college teams to focus on for betting purposes. Here is how bad I heard it was (he would never talk about it to me when I came on board or when we went out for a few drinks with the other surviving high school guys). Alan actually would run a line on the Harvard-Yale game like anybody outside those two schools gave a fuck about the point spread. Was clueless about such teams as Miami (which he thought was Miami of Ohio and wondered why nobody wanted to bet when they played Kent State) and had no idea outside a certain devotion to Notre Dame about serious big-time college football (our “subway” fan Irish neighborhood “go to” team from way back even when they sucked during our high school days team). Worse, that second problem, was that readers were complaining about a guy whose percentages against the point spread had been about ten percent even doing such an operation. One reader told him to use a Ouija board, a couple have his wife make the picks and numbers out a grab bag, stuff like that. 

After a pile of those complains Allan suddenly stopped, stopped cold before the bowls season started the second season. Never to let another live sports piece muddy this site. Until recently when after something like a civil war between us he granted me a reprieve. Let me do a “slice of life” piece about an amateur, very amateur, golf tournament that some friends at my golf club were participating in. I didn’t ask but I assume since the war clouds were looming on the internal disputes after one of the younger writers flat-out refused to write a CD review on Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series Volume l2 declaring it nothing but mishmash and a distraction that he was trying to shore up support from the older writers as the “Young Turks” were throwing down the gauntlet. When I asked Greg Green about doing a short follow up piece after the smoke settled, the one below, he said such, said maybe I should do a whole series of “slice of life” vignettes if I could jumble the thing up with other sports as well as golf.  Si Lannon]           
********

This screed, let’s call it a screed since I am up in arms about what I consider a dastardly deed provoking screed time in me,  is being written on Saturday morning December 9, 2017 from “not the golf course, that expression to be explained posthaste since “weenie,” there is no other way to put it, Frog Pond PGA Golf Professional Robert Kiley  declared yesterday December 8th the end of the golf season as we know it due to what he called, seemingly in panic, a snow emergency demanding all entrances and exits to the property under penalty of death be shuttered for the year since some foul-mouthed weatherman, oops, weatherperson had predicted the first snow of the season. A first snow that however was not projected to start until mid-morning on the 9th.   

Well maybe not under penalty of death on the question of entering the property since we are all paid up members who actually “own” the course through our initiation fees and bond and are entitled to enter all year and play golf weather permitting all year as well using temporary green in the winter, but remember this is a screed. He nevertheless has certainly placed himself as a self-serving “weenie” since when the course “closes” for the year he hightails it down to Naples, Florida and golfs his brains out while we all suffer the “hot stove” winter golf roundtable blues until blissful come hither March. And certainly “panic” is an appropriate expression under the circumstances trusting in some holy goof weatherman, person whatever whose error rate is higher than any golfer’s score. (We by the way for those looking for harsher, rougher words use “weenie” rather than some other derogatory term since golf, unlike rough-hewn sports like bowling and badminton, is a gentlemanly and gentlewomanly pursuit and rather civilized except the vast “open secret” of the not too pleasant fates awaiting the golf balls used to further the sport’s aims.

In any case it is approximately 9:30 AM and I stepped outside for a minute and actually had a flake, one flake, hit my nose. I don’t like to cast aspersions on a man’s manhood especially when he holds the ticket to a person’s season-long entertainment but couldn’t certain rugged individual golfers of my acquaintance, my infamous 6:06 club, named as such for the usual tee time which we start playing at most of the season, that is 6:06 AM by the way so you know these rugged individuals are also old rugged individuals, have faced that one, possibly two snowflakes, and played a robust round at “the Frog” before the heavens erupted.   

Enough of moaning and groaning about short golf seasons though after all in New England unlike Florida or Arizona the serious season has to come to an end at some point. What I am up in arms about is the line in the sand that was drawn yesterday between real golfers and fakahs (what in the rest of the English- speaking world outside of Boston are called fakers). For the uninitiated modern day notice is by ever quick-mail even in ancient golf world and one and all were informed of the closing by e-mail early Friday morning. Certain real golfers, 6:06 Club golfers, knowing the end was near, showed their metal by dropping everything they were doing once the clarion call panicky weenie e-mail came over cyberspace from Golf Central to announce a cease-fire in place. One guy, Sand-bagger Jackson, the moniker tells all, came running from the netherworld of the City of Presidents where he was working diligently on yet another report. Another, Kevin Zonk, moniker also tells a lot, put down pen abruptly and called a halt to yet another so-called earth-shattering conference about some bogus crisis in the health care system to heed the call to arms and yet another, Redoubtable Steve, came speeding from out of nowhere some fifty miles away ready to let the environment in this wicked old world go asunder to get one final fix, to have one final stab at the brass ring. 

On the other side, and by now one and all know what side that is, there are certain guys, okay a certain guy, Kaz, who apparently knows only three letters, who in the interest of making mere filthy lucre debased themselves, no, himself, in order to do mundane things like cover mortgage payments, pay the armed bandits for upcoming educational expenses with daughter college loaming and the like. Now like I said I am not one to cast aspersions on a man’s manhood but what else can one think could be the reason for such an obvious no show. Especially when in the crucial final Frog Pond betting scheme, five dollar a man quota, a certain guy from the City of Presidents found fifteen dollars on the ground, or so it seemed like it.

Later Si Lannon  

    
Posted by at No comments:
Labels:

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

In The Time Of The Second Mountain Music Revival- A Songcatcher Classic Song- "Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies"-Maybelle Carter-Style

In The Time Of The Second Mountain Music Revival- A Songcatcher Classic Song- "Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies"-Maybelle Carter-Style





As told to Si Lannon

A YouTube film clip of a classic Song-Catcher-type song from deep in the mountains, Come All You Fair And Tender Ladies. According to my sources Cecil Sharpe (a British musicologist in the manner of Francis Child with his ballads, Charles Seeger, and the Lomaxes, father and son)"discovered" the song in 1916 in Kentucky. Of course my first connection to the song had nothing to do with the mountains, or mountain origins, or so I though at the time but was heard the first time long ago in my ill-spent 1960s youth listening to a late Sunday night folk radio show on WBZ in Boston hosted by Dick Summer (who is featured on the Tom Rush documentary No Regrets about Tom’s life in the early 1960s Boston folk scene) and hearing the late gravelly-voiced folksinger Dave Van Ronk like some latter-day Jehovah doing his version of the song. I know the next day I rushed over to the now exiled out in Utah somewhere Allan Jackson’s house and asked him if he had heard the song the previous night. He said hell no, this before he became a serious folk aficionado and was still hung up on some lollipop music that all the neighborhood high school girls were going crazy over and so required some attention if he was to get anywhere with Diana Nelson. But that was high school dream stuff so I let it go then. 

A couple of years later when he was in college at Boston University he took a date to the long gone Club Nana over in Harvard Square to hear Dave Von Ronk do the song. He called me the next saying that he finally got it. By the way the way that Club Nana date came about was that his date was crazy for Dave Von Ronk. Some things never changed. In all quite a bit different from the Maybelle Carter effort here. I'll say.
[By the way that “or so I thought” about mountain music later turned out to be not quite true. My father from coal country Hazard, Kentucky out by the hills and hollows (I refuse to write “hollas”) and my mother left Boston for a time to go back to his growing up home to see if they could make a go of it there after World War II. They could not but that was a separate story while they were there I was conceived and being carried in my mothers’ womb so it turned out the damn stuff was in my DNA. Go figure, right.]     

COME ALL YE FAIR AND TENDER LADIES

(A.P. Carter)

The Carter Family - 1932
Come all ye fair and tender ladies
Take warning how you court young men
They're like a bright star on a cloudy morning
They will first appear and then they're gone
They'll tell to you some loving story
To make you think that they love you true
Straightway they'll go and court some other
Oh that's the love that they have for you
Do you remember our days of courting
When your head lay upon my breast
You could make me believe with the falling of your arm
That the sun rose in the West
I wish I were some little sparrow
And I had wings and I could fly
I would fly away to my false true lover
And while he'll talk I would sit and cry
But I am not some little sparrow
I have no wings nor can I fly
So I'll sit down here in grief and sorrow
And try to pass my troubles by
I wish I had known before I courted
That love had been so hard to gain
I'd of locked my heart in a box of golden
And fastened it down with a silver chain
Young men never cast your eye on beauty
For beauty is a thing that will decay
For the prettiest flowers that grow in the garden
How soon they'll wither, will wither and fade away
******
ALTERNATE VERSION:
Come all ye fair and tender ladies
Take warning how you court young men
They're like a star on summer morning
They first appear and then they're gone
They'll tell to you some loving story
And make you think they love you so well
Then away they'll go and court some other
And leave you there in grief to dwell
I wish I was on some tall mountain
Where the ivy rocks are black as ink
I'd write a letter to my lost true lover
Whose cheeks are like the morning pink
For love is handsome, love is charming
And love is pretty while it's new
But love grows cold as love grows old
And fades away like the mornin' dew

And fades away like the mornin' dew
Posted by at No comments:

The Young Women With Long-Ironed Hair- With Joan Baez, Mimi Farina, And Judy Collins In Mind

The Young Women With Long-Ironed Hair- With Joan Baez, Mimi Farina, And Judy Collins In Mind










By Lenny Lancaster

Funny how trends get started, how one person, or a few start something and it seems like the whole world follows, or the part of the world that hears about the new dispensation anyway, the part you want to connect with. That new dispensation for my generation began back in the late 1950s, early 1960s so maybe it was when older guys started to lock-step in gray flannel suits (Mad Men, retro-cool today, okay) and before Jack and Bobby Kennedy put the whammy on the fashion and broke many a haberdasher’s heart topped off by a soft felt hat. It would be deep into the 1960s before open-necks and colors other than white for shirts worked in but by then a lot of us were strictly denims and flannel shirts or some such non-suit combination. Maybe it was when one kid goofing off threw a hard plastic circle thing around his or her waist and every kid from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon had to have one, to be tossed aside in some dank corner of the garage after a few weeks when everybody got into yo-yos or Davey Crockett coonskin caps. Or maybe, and this might be closer to the herd instinct truth, it was after Elvis exploded onto the scene and every guy from twelve to two hundred in the world had to, whether they looked right with it or not, wear their sideburns just a little longer, even if they were kind of wispy and girls laughed at you for trying to out-king the “king” who they were waiting for not you.  

But maybe it was, and this is a truth which I can testify to, noting the photograph above, when some girls, probably college girls (now called young women but then still girls no matter how old except mothers or grandmothers, go figure) having seen Joan Baez on the cover of Time (or perhaps her sister Mimi on some Mimi and Richard Farina folk album cover)got out the ironing board at home or in her dorm and tried to iron their own hair whatever condition it was in, curly, twisty, flippy, whatever  don’t hold me to hairstyles to long and straight strands. (Surely as strong as the folk minute was just then say 1962, 63, 64, they did not see the photo of Joan on some grainy Arise and Sing folk magazine cover the folk scene was too young and small then to cause such a sea-change).

Looking at that photograph now, culled from a calendar put out by the New England Folk Archive Society, made me think back to the time when I believe that I would not go out with a girl (young woman, okay) if she did not have the appropriate “hair,” in other words no bee-hive or flip thing that was the high school rage among the not folk set, actually the social butterfly, cheerleader, motorcycle mama cliques. Which may now explain why I had so few dates in high school and none from Carver High (located about thirty miles south of Boston). But no question you could almost smell the singed hair at times, and every guy I knew liked the style, liked the style if they liked Joan Baez, maybe had some dreamy desire, and that was that.                   

My old friend Sam Lowell, a high school friend who I re-connected with via the “magic” of the Internet a few years ago, told me a funny story when we met at the Sunnyville Grille in Boston one time about our friend Julie Peters who shared our love of folk music back then (and later too as we joined a few others in the folk aficionado world after the heyday of the folk minute got lost in the storm of the British invasion). He had first met her in Harvard Square one night at the Café Blanc when they had their folk night (before every night was folk night at the place when Eric Von Schmidt put the place on the map by writing Joshua Gone Barbados which he sang and which Tom Rush went big with) and they had a coffee together, That night she had her hair kind of, oh he didn’t know what they called it but he thought something like beehive or flip or something which highlighted and enhanced her long face. Sam thought she looked fine. Sam (like myself) was not then hip to the long straight hair thing and so he kind of let it pass without any comment.

Then one night many weeks later after they had had a couple of dates she startled him when he picked her up at her dorm at Boston University to go over the Club Blue in the Square to see Dave Van Ronk hold forth in his folk historian gravelly-voiced way. She met Sam at the door with the mandatory long-stranded hair which frankly made her face even longer. When Sam asked her why the change Julie declared that she could not possibly go to Harvard Square looking like somebody from some suburban high school not after seeing her idol Joan Baez (and later Judy Collins too) with that great long hair which seemed very exotic, very Spanish.

Of course he compounded his troubles by making the  serious mistake of asking if she had it done at the beauty parlor or something and she looked at him with burning hate eyes since no self-respecting folkie college girl would go to such a place where her mother would go, So she joined the crowd, Sam got used to it and after a while she did begin to look like a folkie girl (and started wearing the inevitable peasant blouses instead of those cashmere sweaters or starched shirt things she used to wear).     

By the way let’s be clear on that Julie thing with Sam back the early 1960s. She and Sam went “dutch treat” to see Dave Van Ronk at the Club Blue. Sam and Julie were thus by definition not on a heavy date, neither had been intrigued by the other enough to be more than very good friends after the first few dates but folk music was their bond. Despite persistent Julie BU dorm roommate rumors what with Sam hanging around all the time listening to her albums on the record player they had never been lovers. A few years later she mentioned that Club Blue night to Sam as they waited to see Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie with me and my companion, Laura Talbot, to see if he remembered Van Ronk’s performance and while he thought he remembered he was not sure.

He asked Julie, “Was that the night he played that haunting version of Fair and Tender Ladies with Eric Von Schmidt backing him up on the banjo?” Julie had replied yes and that she too had never forgotten that song and how the house which usually had a certain amount of chatter going on even when someone was performing had been dead silent once he started singing.

As for the long-ironed haired women in the photograph their work in that folk minute and later speaks for itself. Joan Baez worked the Bob Dylan anointed “king and queen” of the folkies routine for a while for the time the folk minute lasted. Mimi (now passed on) teamed up with her husband, Richard Farina, who was tragically killed in a motorcycle crash in the mid-1960s, to write and sing some of the most haunting ballads of those new folk time (think Birmingham Sunday). Julie Collins, now coiffured like that mother Julie was beauty parlor running away from and that is okay, still produces beautiful sounds on her concert tours. But everyone should remember, every woman from that time anyway, should remember that burnt hair, and other sorrows, and know exactly who to blame. Yeah, we have the photo.            
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)